The ghost of life: Constant hearses

Medical science—actual study, research, testing and the like—is largely what enabled the expansion of white society into Africa, Latin America and Asia. I don’t hold that against science—a lot of local people threw off the burden of diseases like dengue, cholera, malaria, typhoid and yellow fever because of these advances. Not sure you can blame the scientists for what the empire-builders did with their work.

Fun fact: the guy for whom Walter Reed Army Hospital was named was the one who in 1901 broke the back of yellow fever—building on the work of a Cuban doctor—by confirming that the aedes aegypti mosquito carried the bacillus.

Fun fact 2: Aedes aegypti also carries bacilli for Zika, West Nile, dengue and other stuff. That little insect is quite the vector.

Well, yellow fever has attacked the United States several times. It’s a major plot point in the movie Jezebel in 1852 New Orleans. And there was a terrible outbreak in Philadelphia in 1793, which left 5000 dead.

The American poet, polemicist, sea captain and newspaper editor Philip Freneau (1752-1832) lived through and wrote about this epidemic. The thing that strikes me is the priests fleeing their pulpits (and—by extension—their congregations) in terror.

Of course, we see their spiritual descendants in the so-called pastors of megachurches alternating their appeals for money with pitches for sure-fire COVID19 cures. Ugh.

(Look—this is not the best poem ever written. But the guy lived through yellow fever, and he still has a story to tell us.)

“Pestilence: Written During the Prevalence of a Yellow Fever”

Hot, dry winds forever blowing,

Dead men to the grave-yards going:

     Constant hearses,

     Funeral verses;

Oh! what plagues--there is no knowing!

Priests retreating from their pulpits!—

Some in hot, and some in cold fits

     In bad temper,

     Off they scamper,

Leaving us--unhappy culprits!

Doctors raving and disputing,

death's pale army still recruiting—

     What a pother

     One with t'other!

Some a-writing, some a-shooting.

Nature's poisons here collected,

Water, earth, and air infected—

     O, what a pity,

     Such a City,

Was in such a place erected!